Writers Supporting Writers

I read somewhere that every story needs a conflict, with consequences riding on the outcome. Now, I’m not sure that’s true for all stories. Literary writers can get away with almost anything in their fiction, and more power to them. However, expectations are different in genre fiction. Genre fiction has its formulas, be it romance, mysteries, thrillers, westerns, horror, fantasy/science, paranormal fiction, or what have you. Genre readers expect stories to include their favorite tropes. These tropes almost always involve both conflict and danger. So yes, I suppose that most genre stories need conflict and dire consequences to work. The issue I have with this premise is that the table stakes for these conflicts and consequences have escalated to the point where they’ve become so grand that they’re rather silly, even absurd. Plus, they’re often violent, gory, and ultimately so common as to be trite.

Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes was content to solve mysteries that did not involve murder. Today, every mystery, no matter how cozy, must involve at least one murder. A dead man, woman, or child is the starting table stake for today’s mysteries. Often the ante is upped with a second murder. And a third. And even a fourth. And when every little village has a murder every couple of months like clockwork, these stakes get silly. I’ve lived in a small town for 30 some years and the only murders that regularly occur are self-murders; suicides and overdoses; the people who die “unexpectedly” in obits.

It possible to write a mystery that doesn’t involve murder. Doyle did. Heck, I did as well. I’m sure today’s mystery writers could do it too. But there is no tried and true formula for that type of mystery, making them harder to write. There may be thousands of such manuscripts in drawers, unpublished, because agents, editors, or publishers didn’t buy them because they believe that they wouldn’t sell. Maybe they’re right. Maybe the table stakes are too low, without death in a story. But I doubt it.

And take paranormal, fantasy, and science fiction; these stories are often dark and grim these days – or rather, “grimdark.” Moreover, it is very hard to find a fantasy or science fiction story that does not involve war. A century ago Lord Dunsany wrote a fantasy story about several servants conversing in the basement of a London club about the members of the club – the members being old and forgotten gods who gathered at the club to reminisce. Tolkien, however, brought the Great War into fantasy, and so these days those old and forgotten gods no longer sit around reminiscing; they’ve returned to wage war and makeover the world in their evil image. They’re only deterred from doing so by a band of misfits and their supernatural magical powers. At least until the publisher pulls the plug on the series. And if the heroes are not misfits, they’re princes or princesses, future or deposed, who must save the throne and kingdom, or recapture it from evil usurpers.

And in almost all these stories, a war is either looming, on going, or just ended, with graphic descriptions. Bloody battles are fought in great detail. War, gore, death and destruction are the table stakes for so many fantasies – echoing the trenches of the Great War.

It’s no different in science fiction. All too often the fate of the human race, a galactic empire, or indeed, all creation teeters on the brink of destruction, to be saved, against all odds, by that band of plucky misfits again. Destroying entire planets is the starting ante for many of these stories and it goes up from there. Now, this is nothing new in science fiction, E E Smith was throwing whole galaxies around 90 years ago. However, the amount of blood, gore, casual killing, rape, and sadistic cruelty chronicled in both science fiction and fantasy today seems to have escalated expediently over the years. I’ve been reading the short reviews of books entered into the Self Published Science Fiction Contest, and many of the reviewers mention how much violence they encountered while reading just the first 10% of the books they were sampling.

Now I have nothing against using war, gore, death and destruction – or old ladies to solve murders – in books on any moral grounds. Obviously they sell, and so they must have their fans. I’m just not one of them – a simple a matter of personal taste. What I don’t like about these tropes, these formulas, is that they strike me as being cheap tricks. Lazy writing. The table stakes have been upped to make the events of the story, and thus, the story itself seem all the more important – larger than life. Their heroes are princes and princesses, not ordinary people. And if not royalty, they’re still some sort of superhero. Conflict and consequences are then ramped up the max. “Ignore the little man behind the curtain,” seems to be the name of the game. But it was the little man behind the curtain who was, in fact, interesting, not the terrifying, but ultimately hollow, Wise and Benevolent Oz.

I believe that a competent writer can tell exciting stories without resorting to Wagnerian heights. Doomsday is indeed coming. It’s the day you die. For all of us, the world ends with our death. And so too does it for the characters you create in your story. Life and death stakes for the characters alone can make for an exciting story. Indeed, you can write an exciting story without life and death stakes. There is no need to have the fate of the world hanging in the balance as well. If you make your characters engaging, and then kill them off, would that be a less devastating ending to the reader then if Evil won in the end? Is not everything beyond the fate of your characters little more than stage settings? The theater shows that you can scale back to the essentials without losing the drama.

I like to keep things simple. I like things that are understated. However, I am fully aware that everyone is different. There are people who want to read, and writers who want to write, stories with a far wider sweep, and grander scale, than I do. Heck, there are people who like opera. Each to his or her own tastes, and I’m fine with that. Still, I wish I could find stories to my tastes, without writing them.

Perhaps the market demands vast stakes. Maybe high stakes, war and gore are what agents, editors, publishers want to buy, and readers want to read. But does that mean they won’t read and enjoy stories that don’t quite follow that formula? As writers and publishers we don’t have to follow the pack. We can chart our own course. I believe that characters – people – are the heart of most good stories. They don’t need to be the center of their fictional universe to be important. Create compelling characters and readers will enveloped in the story, without the need for a grand setting and vast table stakes.

So what’s your take, both as a reader, and as a writer, on the scope of a story? Do you enjoy vast empires teetering in the balance? Do you like to read and write about larger than life characters facing impossible odds? Is grandma solving a murder a month or vast cosmic horrors lurking on the edge of night your thing? Or do you think that characters matter more than the scale of action? The clock is ticking… Comment. You have only minutes to save the world by commenting!!!

The latest chat by the Writers Supporting Writers group.

— Mark Paxson

Earlier today, I saw a tweet from a writer announcing her new book was about to be published. Her tweet identified her publisher and I immediately had a suspicion. I looked up the publisher and, yep, it’s one of those publishers. For a small fee, they’ll do everything to make your publishing dreams come true.

Most of these publishers seem to charge around $2,000 – 3,000 and offer some level of editing or proofreading, a cover, and distribution. But ultimately, actually selling your book rests on your shoulders. This particular publisher had the highest cost publishing package I’ve seen — $8,500.

I immediately wanted to tweet my outrage at this, but I had an epiphany. Much like we talk about there being no rules to writing and that writers should write whatever and however they want, it’s the same with how we each pursue our publishing dreams.

I’ve opted for self-publishing. The tools are out there and it’s easy enough for me to master. I usually pay for some minor editing and with my last novel I paid for a cover for the first time. I’m going to keep doing that for the foreseeable future when I self-publish. The costs for that editing and a good cover are worth it to me, whether or not I make the money back.

But that’s the thing about self-publishing, more popularly known as indie publishing, there are all sorts of variations of it. What you do as an indie author, publishing your own work, depends entirely on what you’re comfortable with, what you can afford. There are indie authors who put books out without much editing (grrrr), who design their own covers (some better than others), and who do everything else themselves. There are some who do a little more, or a lot more. It’s just up to each author, and those who have mastered the marketing/promotion game to find bigger audiences are in the sweet spot of the indie industry.

Between those indie authors and traditional publishing is this vast industry that has popped up. It is today’s vanity publishign industry. All sorts of “publishers” who promise indie authors all sorts of services and the glories of publication. For a small fee.

I’ve been extremely pessimistic about these services for years. I think they are playing off the dreams of writers, pocking their fees, and not doing much to actually earn those fees. I’ve known several people who have used these services. At least four off the top of my head. They paid their fee, progressed to publishing with varying degrees of satisfaction that also came along with varying degrees of delay and disengagement from their publisher. And when it comes to what really matters … actual book sales … they had no better luck than I have.

And then there is traditional publishing, where you’ve got to run the gauntlet. Some publishers accept unagented manuscripts. Most do not. As a result, to have any chance, you gotta get that agent. Plus, a lot of those publishers who accept unagented manuscripts tend towards the small end of the publishing world, which means they may just publish the book and leave the promo efforts to the writer.

The problem with traditional publishing is that it is a gatekeeper system and unless you know the pass code, the secret handshake, and a few other things, it’s virtually impossible to get in through the gate. There are all sorts of indie published books out there that are among the best books I’ve read in recent years. I know of some indie manuscripts in search of a traditional publisher that would absolutely knock your socks off. But, they can’t get in the door. Why? Because traditional publishing is a funnel that moves only towards books that will be popular, easy to sell, that fit neatly into the only round hole the publisher has a peg for.

Okay, I’ve over-simplified all of those options. There are variations within options within choices inside each of those three options.

What you should do with all of these options and their variations is do what you’re comfortable with. If you have the money for one of those publishing companies, go for it. If you’re not comfortable doing all of the formatting and other work yourself, go for it. If you want to keep knocking on the traditional publishing door, go for it. If you want to do it all yourself, go for it.

It’s your dream. It’s your creation. It’s your story. You can put it out into the world however you want. But … please do your research, find others that have traveled the path you are choosing to learn from their experiences, and keep your expectations reasonable. Don’t expect miracles. Don’t expect a bestseller. Don’t actually have any expectations at all. As I’ve been told for the last ten years, only the tiniest fraction of writers actually make a living at writing.

I would like to hear from writers who have used any of the publishing services that charge a fee for publishing your book. What was your experience? Good or bad? Successful or not? What happened once you signed the contract (although I’ve heard interesting tidbits about the “before contrat” conversations)? What happened once your book was published? Anything and everything. If you have any experience with that option, I’d love to put a post up here with your experiences.

Do you have music on in the background while you write? Are you of of those writers who writes in the local coffee shop for the subtle chatter and sense of companionship that it provides for what is otherwise a solitary pursuit? Or do you need the sounds of silence to bring forth the words?

After choosing to write an essay on this topic, I, uncharacteristically, decided that I should research the question. That’s what the internet is good for, besides cute cat pictures. My far-from-exhaustive research found that many authors write with music in the background. In fact, 80% of them, in a small survey. Scientist, on the other hand, have conducted many tests and have generally found that background music inhibits performance in students and writing. Their theory for this negative effect is that the brain has to process the music, which in turn, narrows the bandwidth available for processing the thoughts you are trying to find words for. This apparently applies to all types of music. They suggest that you use music to put yourself in a good state of mind before you sit down to write, but then write in silence.

I am one of those writers who listen to music while I write – quiet, mostly instrumental music, delivered by Spotify. I have days and days worth of music in various playlists on Spotify. Until recently, that is. Spotify discontinued the tier I’ve had for a decade, and unless I pay twice the rate I had been paying, I’ll have to find some other source of background music or write in silence. So I’ve been writing in silence for the last month or so, just to see how important music really was for me. The results are… inconclusive. I can write, but it’s not quite the same.

For example, I am writing this essay in silence. When I stop to think of what I want to write next, I find that the silence is a little stressful. I feel that something is missing, There’s a hole that needs to be filled. I think that the music in the background carries me through these pauses while I’m thinking. With music I never quite come to a dead stop. And yet, when I am writing with the music on, I hardly ever hear it. The music goes in one ear and out the other unnoticed most of the time. So it’s not some sort of soundtrack or anything like that. It’s just there, to fill holes, as needed. Plus, with music on, I don’t have to hear the ringing in my ears like I am now when writing this in silence. So I think I can say that while background music isn’t essential, I do want my music back. Just as soon as Spotify offers me a deal, that is.

In any event, what about you? Do you need music, or need silence? Are you one of the cool kids who take their laptop to the coffee house to write? And what type of music do you listen to? Do you have playlists for certain moods, certain scenes or books? Share your music.

NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) starts next Monday. Is anyone planning to write a novel this November?

I’ve never tried NaNoWritMo, but I’m planning to give it an unofficial shot this year. Winter in Wisconsin is a perfect time to write a novel. I don’t want to waste all the time I must spend indoors doing nothing. But these days it seems that I need some motivation, so I’m hoping that NaNoWriMo will provide that for me this year.

I don’t think I’ll actually sign up on the website. (https://nanowrimo.org/) I’m a time spent writing rather than word count oriented writer – and I find word count goals tend to be inhibiting rather than motivating for me. However, since I have most of the high points of a short 50-60K word novel in my current series in mind, I think that I could get at least a good start on a first draft done in a month. We’ll see.

So what about you guys? Has anyone ever participated in the program? What was your experience?

One of the things I like about writing is giving stories to people I come across in real life. There are variations on this idea and I’ve written a few pieces that are my attempts to do so.

One morning when I got to work, I learned that there was a body outside our building. A man was dead from a gun shot. I thought about him all day and went home and wrote his obituary. Not really an obituary, but a short story of his life and how he ended up outside our building with a gun in his hand.

There are other examples of this, but enough about my approach to this concept. Here’s your chance.

Pick a character in your real life — the barista, the bartender, the old lady at the corner who never comes out of her house, anybody — and give them a story. Tell us who they are, why they are and how they came to the place where they’re at.

If you do, share it with us with a link in the commets or email at writinghelp2021@gmail.com.

— Mark Paxson

I wasn’t able to join the recent video chat. Something to do with packing up my kid for his latest journey away from the family home. Latest, as in last. I hope.

But here are my thoughts on the topics discussed in the chat. Before I get to the specifics, I just want to say this. I have very strong opinions about writing rules, as anybody who has watched our videos likely knows. And I agree with Audrey when she says early in the video that a lot of that resistance frequently has to do with how they are framed.

I have said that my favorite quote about writing is the one I heard at a writing conference I went to — there are no rules in writing, except for one. Write a good story.

That’s really all there should be. But I get that some people need more. How exactly does one go about writing a good story? To address that question, how about we change the nature of the conversation. From rules to advice. From “must do’s” and “cannot do’s” to “why not try it this way” or “if this isn’t working for you, give this other approach a shot.”

If the discussion is cast in the form of advice, I’m fine with it. Advice that leaves open the possibility that not everything comes from a cookie cutter. Because, here’s the deal, as discussed in the video chat — there is no creativity in a cookie cutter. Creativity comes in trying to write a story that bends the rules, breaks the rules, sometimes shatters the rules. Unless, of course, you’re only interested in writing to the formulas of your favorite genre. But the thing is … these deadly writer sins, the rules of writing that people throw out there, rarely focus on the idea that these rules are what is needed for specific genres. No, they are presented as though they are the magic sauce for every piece of fiction you may want to write.

So, let’s take a look at the first deadly writer sin … location. The author of this particular post that we were responding to states emphatically that the writer must tell the reader where the story is located. She suggests that any change in location needs to be identified from the outset. But … but … but!!

I’m reminded of my experience at the Mendocino Coast Writer’s Conference. Again, something I have discussed before. One writer in our group of 12, when reading and critiquing other participant’s writing, constantly complained that “you didn’t explain this,” “you didn’t tell us that.” She was upset that every action wasn’t explained in detail. And I kept wanting to say that a writer should not have to provide every single detail, fact, and explanation to the reader. Some of the “work” of reading a story is imagining things and figuring them out as you go.

Reading the discussion of this in the blog post makes me feel like writing a story is nothing more than writing an outline. Or, let me change that. I’m an attorney. In law school, we learn the approach we’re supposed to take to analyzing legal questions — IRAC — Issue, Rule, Analysis, Conclusion. The creativity of fiction demands more than that. And you want to know what? The best writing, the best stories don’t have to handfeed every bit to you.

No, instead, the best writers find ways to show you the world they have created without spoonfeeding it to you like a law school outline. If you want to write a good story, you don’t begin your chapter with London and a dateline — unless those things are absolutely critical to the story and the context needs to be established clearly at the beginning of the story.

One final point about location. I don’t know that I’ve ever read a piece of fiction in my 50+ years of reading where I’ve not understand the location of the story or if there are shifts in location, that there are shifts in location. I simply have never noticed this as a problem in the thousands of short stories and novels I have read in my lifetime. So … I’m not even sure why this is an issue.

(By the way, I’m intentionally not linking to the blog post we were responding to. Why? Because this isn’t about that particular person or even about the specific “rules” she covers. It’s more about … well, I guess I just need to vent because I see so much of this on Twitter and elsewhere. Rules. Rules. Rules. And I just think that people who write about these rules as though they are absolutes do no service to writers.)

I’m not going to cover every thing in the blog post. There’s just one other thing I want to address. After covering the four deadly sins, the author reveals “The Top Secret Bestseller’s Tip.” And what is it?

“The vitally first line — and last line — of every chapter. There is one purpose to those first and last lines — and that is to catapult the reader from one chapter to the next, from one page to the next.”

To be honest, this sounds like an agent talking. It’s the old idea of “you have to grab your reader by the throat with your opening line, paragraph or page.” And if you don’t, you’ve lost the battle. Only, it’s that idea on steroids. Every single chapter must begin and end with a line that catapults the reader!

Well, sure. If the rest of the words in the chapter are complete crap, you’ve got to do something to … catapult your reader on. But, come on, if you’ve done your work as a writer, and written a good story, the weight of the chapter, the work you’ve done in building that chapter and the entire arc of the story will keep your reader reading, with or without a compelling first or last sentence.

The more I think about this, the more I think these ideas are really for people who cannot write a good story. These ideas are what you do if you need to mask a lousy story. That’s all I can think of in response to these “rules.” If you write a good story, the rhythm and flow of it, the pull of the world you’ve created, all of this will carry the reader from word to word, page to page, chapter to chapter, beginning to end and all will be good. If you’re focusing instead on the first sentence and last sentence of each chapter, on whether you’ve adequately provided the location and other “facts” a reader needs, you may be focusing on the wrong thing.

What you’ll end up with is a box store like a Home Depot, instead of a Frank Lloyd Wright masterpiece.

You’ve made your choice – to go wide or go all in on Amazon. If you’re all in on Amazon, move along, nothing to see here. But if you’ve gone wide, do you have your books in the Google Play Book Store? And if you do, how’s it working for you? I ask this because Google Play has recently become my best “selling” venue.

Please note that I give away my books, which is several orders of magnitude easier than selling books for money. Free, however, does generate enough “sales” numbers that they can be used to compare markets.

I started publishing books in April of 2015 via Smashwords and Amazon. In October of 2018 I got my books into the Google Play Store. I gave away 11 books that first month on Google. The following year Google accounted for about 9% of my sales, rising to 15% in 2020. This year Google started with 137 sales in January, and has continued to grow almost every month since then. Indeed, to date Google sales account for 33.4% of this year’s sales thru September, with Amazon at 42% and Smashwords at 24.5%. For some unknown reason I did really well on Google in September with total sales clocking in at almost three times that of Smashwords and Amazon combined. All in all, Google now accounts for a little more than 10% of my all times sales, though it’s only been part of the mix for half of the time I’ve been selling books.

Of course your books, the number of your titles, and readership will be different from mine, but I think it’s safe to say that if you haven’t listed your books on Google, you may be missing sales.

It used to be that you had to ask Google for an invitation to list your books, but when I googled the procedure for this article, the search took me here; https://play.google.com/books/publish/ where it seems all you have to do is sign up. But seeing that I was already signed into Google, “getting started” just took me to my Google page, so I can’t say for certain what you can expect.

Unlike Smashwords and Amazon, with Google you have to upload your own epub version of your book. If you already format your files as epubs they should be good to go. But if – like me – you don’t, then you’ll need to do it yourself. I use Calibre, a free program, to convert my LibreOffice files to epubs.

I’m no expert in Calibre so I keep it simple. I upload my LibreOffice file to Calibre, and then convert it to a version 3 epub using the default settings with Heuristic processing checked. Be sure to select version 3 when the time comes, as I get error messages when uploading version 2 epubs to Google. Once converted, the epub file ends up in the Calibre folder. From there I upload the epub file to Google. I include the cover when creating the epub in Calibre, even though you’ll still need to upload the cover to Google as a jpeg separately, just like the other stores. And like the other stores you’ll have to fill out all the metadata on the book, author bio if you like, and set the price and territories. Google reports daily sales with a day or two lag. I don’t know how payment works, but I assume that it is similar to the other services as well. Google pay 70% royalties.

It is rare that I can pinpoint a reason for any unanticipated jump in sales, and I can’t explain why Google is doing so well for me this year. I can’t find anything on the Google Play Books store to explain it. All I can say is that people are getting their ebooks from the Google store, and if you don’t have your books there, you may be missing out.

— Mark Paxson

After a week of words and what amounts to a daily flash fiction writing effort, I’m posting my story below. If you participated, I hope you share your story with us. Drop a link in comments or email us at writinghelp2021@gmail.com.

Facilitation