Everyone has the answers, but there are no answers

There is no shortage of experts who will tell an author what the secret to financial success is in publishing.  Also, there is no limit to the number of experts who will contradict the last expert with whom you spoke.  Some charge money, some don't.  Some have risen to respected positions in publishing, representation, or the media, and some haven't.

Eager authors jump from expert to expert, trying something new, trying to unlock the magic formula.  For those who take comfort in organization and predictability, this can be frustrating.  They sometimes can't understand why the last effort didn't work.  

They think, "If I throw a match on a puddle of gasoline, there will be fire.  So, I did what they said, and my book didn't explode.  It makes no sense."

However, marketing art is not like a lab experiment or writing software.  It's not a series of "IF...THEN" statements, like flipping binary switches, that must result in the desired outcome.

It is art.  Human taste is involved.  Human instincts come into play.  There is luck in the mix. None of these things can be quantified, and so authors end up with a recipe without measurements.

To bake a successful book, add 1 cup of water to some flour and salt, some sort of sweetener (the customer will tell you which one is the best after it's baked).  Put into the oven.  What temp?  The industry will crank that up and down, so good luck, you have no control on oven temp.  Leave it in there for somewhere between 15 minutes and 6 hours.

This is especially hard on those authors who insist that there must be a correct combination, and those who have found a way to succeed all their lives by simply working harder.  They believe success is nothing more than will power and talent.  With art, it's simply not the case.  

We cannot will an agent or publisher to love a story.  We cannot will a customer to buy a book.  It's not all up to the author.  Some authors, when they truly learn this, abandon publishing.  If they can't control everything, then why put that much work into something?  They can't imagine working their asses off, only to have success determined by the tastes and whims of other people.

But that has ALWAYS been the creative person's lot in life.  The zen of it is learning to write for writing sake, offering work that you love to others knowing that they might reject it.  Being rejected is not losing.  When I go fishing, with the first cast of my line, and I reel it in without a fish, I haven't "lost" at fishing.  I cast again.

Imagine sitting on a bank and a fly fisherman comes along.  He wades in, with a fly he tied himself, that he thinks is great, and he casts.  Hooking nothing, he casts again.  As the afternoon goes on, each cast is a bit angrier, and he's looking on his phone, watching YouTube videos of expert fly fishermen casting.  Now, imagine how much worse it would be with people on the bank calling out conflicting advice: "Cast over there! It worked for me!"  "You didn't invest enough in the pole and waders! You have no chance of the fish noticing you!" "You should be spearfishing!" "There are so many fish here!" "Fishing is dead!"

You look up, at the beautiful sky, and the wonderful day around you, birds, sweet scent of grass, the sound of the river, and the noise of a cussing, stomping fisherman making his way out of the water, saying, "The whole system is corrupt!  And rigged!  I'm doing everything right!  The fish in this river are especially stupid!" 

Just stop.  Stop.  Move to a different bend in the river.  Calm down.  Maybe put that fly away, and tie another.  Don't throw it away, simply put it aside.  A frustrated fly fisherman is missing the best part of the experience.  Smile at the advice, but don't chase from one advisor to another, in a panic.

Keep in mind, most overnight successes took 15 to 20 years to be successful.  Also keep in mind, some fisherman go home empty-handed, even when they did everything right.  The unhappy ones are the control-freaks who attempted to compel the fish to behave a certain way.  The happy ones are the ones who enjoyed the fishing.  

Finally, books aren't something we cram down people's throats.  Books are what authors leave behind.  F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby was considered a failure until AFTER he died in 1940.  It was made popular by thousands of soldiers, serving in the war, who were sent piles of books. The GIs discovered it, and it became a huge success.  The novel brought entertainment to so many in such a tough situation.  It has been a huge success ever since, and there are many examples like it.  

If you're an author, you're a part of a much bigger thing than some transactional arrangement where you build a widget, and try to sell it. If you don't get that, you're missing it.

Writing Badly

I was once married to a brilliant singer, and while we were on our way from our apartment in Pacific Grove to Carmel-by-the-Sea, we were listening to a Beach Boys cassette tape.  As we drove along, we were singing, and of course she was hitting every note.  I was missing one here and there, but she was kind, and found something nice to say like, "Nice breath control."

But then, on the topic of missing notes, she said something I hadn't considered before. She pointed out that it took considerable talent to intentionally miss every single note, because you'd have to know what the right note was, and then assiduously avoid it, while singing another note, preferably a real clunker.  She was right.  Try it sometime.
The same can be true of writing.  One of my grad school mentors was a terrific Maine author and playwright named Mike Kimball, and he once wrote a humorous story about squirrels, intentionally missing every note when it came to writing craft.  
The room was filled at the reading, mostly MFA students and faculty, and we hadn't recovered from the last belly laugh before the next came.  He crushed it.  Most of the clunkers were because the prose was so over the top, and so repetitive in its repeating of what had already been said...plus throw in rodent love...
Anyway, there is an event called the Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest which is looking to award a small prize for the worst opening line.  Known to many as the "Dark and Stormy Night" contest, it's run by San Jose State University, and writers attempt to miss all the notes while crafting a horrible opener, and then submit it.
The contest is named for the novelist Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, author of the well known first line, "It was a dark and stormy night," from his 1830 novel Paul Clifford. Snoopy, when he was crafting his novel, often used it. 
The whole of that stinker of an opener goes, "It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."
P-U, but the contest attracts over ten thousand entrants annually, and has been broken into subcats like mystery, romance, western, YA, etc.  
There comes a point when one more stroke of the brush diminishes the painting.  Bulwer-Lytton took a roller to his painting in the opening line.  
It's important to be detail-oriented when writing, but in my opinion it's hugely important to be economical as well, and to trust the reader for Heaven's sake.  Let the reader do some of the work, which sounds like a fortune cookie at a writing seminar, but it's true.  
For fun, here are some of the winners and runners-up from a recent Bulwer-Lytton contest:

2020 Grand Prize - Lisa Kluber, San Francisco, CA

Her Dear John missive flapped unambiguously in the windy breeze, hanging like a pizza menu on the doorknob of my mind.

2020 Crime & Detective category winner - Yale Abrams, Santa Rosa, CA

When she walked into my office on that bleak December day, she was like a breath of fresh air in a coal mine; she made my canary sing.

2020 Romance category winner - Julie Winspear, Washington D.C.

In Gertrude’s experience lovemaking was always bittersweet, or at least it had been until one fateful night when Chaz, the seductive man behind the concession stand blessed her with the salty-sweet bliss reminiscent of both true romance and quality kettle corn.

2020 Historical Fiction category winner- Edward Covolo, Menlo Park, CA

When Sir John of York fought in the crusades, he killed many Saracens with great dispatch, and was likened unto a whirling dervish of steel and Christian might—minus the dizziness from constantly spinning in a circle, and the fact that he was on a horse that couldn't do that.

Here's my advice.  Just write, in as natural a voice as you can.  Don't try to sound like someone you once heard, but you were reading, so it was the voice in your head, or one of them, with words being put in its mouth by another writer.  

Relax, and write.

So this whole YA thing...

Young Adult fiction just kept coming up.  I don't mean the new book sales.  I don't mean one agent after another who said they were actively looking for YA.  I mean readers.  Smart adults, that I admire, reading YA.

Now, I admit, I was skeptical.  Why would educated, erudite adults, all clearly smarter than I, be reading YA?  I know people are quick to point out that YA means that the protagonist is young, usually a teen, and that YA does not that the language in the book is written at a lower reading level.

So, I began researching and reading.  Turns out, most YA fiction IS written at a lower reading level than most adult fiction.  So, people who get insulted by those who say some readers have turned to YA because it is easier to read probably should get over it.

It is also true that most YA, actually I could find no exception, features a main character between the ages of 14 and 18.

However, it is also true that I was surprised by some of the YA fiction.  I was surprised to find some of the language- the diction, the syntax- was actually challenging reading and clever writing.  I was also surprised to find very intricate plotting, and complex themes.

I realized that not all YA was easy to read, and certainly some YA was difficult to write.  In light of this, and because I love to learn-by-doing, I decided to try and write a YA novel.  The entire book is written in 1st person, from the point-of-view of a 16 year old girl.  I did, in fact, learn a lot.

I also had a lot of fun.  I finished the first draft of my first YA novel today.  The working title is "Celestine," which is also the protagonist's first name.  Celestine Tolland has found herself in a new place and time, after great loss, and has to find her way.  These are familiar tropes, I know, but to live inside the head of teenage girl since November has been both eye-opening and exhausting.

I always learn from the characters I invent.  The Night Stalkers series I wrote featured a female protagonist, so that wasn't the particularly new part.  It was the combination of gender and age. Teenage girls live in an especially fun and simultaneously vicious world, filled with opportunities for stories.

Now, I'll set to revising the "Celestine," and hopefully I'll be querying agents about the project in the coming months.

In the end, I have learned that I enjoy writing Young Adult fiction.  I am not sure what my next novel will be, but it just might be another YA project.

Saving Moira

My current work in progress has the working title Saving Moira and the first draft will run short.  I believe a novel should really hit the 70k word mark at the very least, and this novel's first draft will end well short of that.  This only means I have the room to go back through and weave an additional subplot through it, but I don't know yet what that will be.

In Saving Moira, Christopher Beranger made his dying wife a promise to bury her on the land they owned and loved.  What he couldn’t tell Moira, as she lay in her deathbed, was that the bank had already begun foreclosure proceedings.

Christopher and Moira lived with their dog, well-liked by neighbors, but they kept mostly to themselves.  When they received the dire prognosis, Christopher stopped taking work and they spent their time walking the wooded acreage together until Moira simply was no longer strong enough.

After she died, Christopher kept his promise and buried her in her favorite spot, down by a bend in the brook.  He then dug false graves, filling the forest with them, in an attempt to confound any attempt by others to find her.

The bank auctioned off the property, and Christopher was resigned to leaving the house with only their dog and a few odds and ends, until an order to move Moira provoked a confrontation.  Among those who wanted her moved were the land development company which won the auction, and Moira’s brother Mike, who wanted his sister buried elsewhere.

Sympathetic to Christopher were the local police chief, Lem Holt, and an attractive print journalist named Karen Kendall.  Karen took up Christopher’s cause, and wrote about the couple and Christopher’s promise.  Soon protesters were at the property showing solidarity with Christopher and Moira and angry with the banking system and the so-called 1%.  Mike, Moira’s brother, was also there, with a handful of supporters of his own.

Now, the sheriff’s department intends to execute the eviction order, and time is running out for Christopher….

…and that’s what I’ve written so far in the novel Saving Moira.

I'd like to write some more today, but I have to finish preparing for the college course I begin teaching tomorrow. 

Aliens, Drywall, and a Unicycle

In researching The Twin, I read countless books.  Well, maybe not countless, and not cover to cover, but I read huge chunks of almost thirty different books and many different web sources.  I mean, I was immersed in Josephus (the 1st century scholar), the Gnostic gospels and Pistis Sophia, and three different translations of the Bible (of which, Young's Literal Translation was especially useful).

After The Twin, for my next project, I wanted to do something completely different.  As one might imagine, my use of language, tone, and even huge pieces of plotting were constrained by historical events and my imagined expectations of the readers.  When the next novel came along, I decided I wanted to go a bit nuts.

Even the working title- Aliens, Drywall, and a Unicycle- started as a bit of a joke.  In fact, it was even worse originally, as Aliens, Drywall, God, and a Unicycle, but I decided to shorten it a bit.  I also know that someday when the ms is published, the title will likely be changed.  Novels differ from poetry that way.  With a poem, the title is part of the poem.  With novels, the title is part of the marketing.

Aliens, Drywall, and a Unicycle is the story of Tom Tibbets, who takes a job at a weekly newspaper in Portage, New Hampshire and an apartment in the old Cooper Building where the residents form a kaleidoscope of the odd, interesting, and insane.  Tom, against his better judgment, is soon assigned to write a series of features on his colorful neighbors.  

There’s elderly Marie downstairs, who is sure we are all the descendants of ancient aliens, and there is Ben, the pothead philosopher who works at McDonald’s.  There are the Lennox brothers who hang drywall for a living and play with explosives for fun.  There is Winnie, the albino vegan pacifist, and Rich and Becky Kapel, who despite renting a top-floor apartment, are nomadic born-again Christians who drop by in their Winnebago from time to time.  There is Leaf, the self-harming nymphomaniac who attempts suicide every couple of weeks, and Miguel who is a middle-aged, long-haired, chain-smoking schizophrenic, who is always seen riding his unicycle.  Finally, there is the mysterious and wise Mr. Hitch whom no one seems to know, but who appears at different times wearing such varied things as wetsuits, cowboy costumes, and roller-blades.

At first, Tom feels like the only sane person in the building.  However, he soon identifies more and more with his neighbors who are more three-dimensional than they initially appeared and who actually might have life figured out. The very people he at first considered unstable and strange become a lens through which he gets a new look at himself and everything else.

His contempt for his job, his boss, the outside world, and his life as he knew it grows.  Just as it seems Tom will simply be assimilated into the cast of tenants, the tragic accidental death of one of his neighbors not only derails his life, but leaves the tenant community forever changed and off-balance.  Tom comes to wonder if his karmaic weight, added to the Cooper building, has thrown off the bizarre status-quo energetic balance of the place.  In the end, however, the story is a tragi-rom-comedy featuring Tom’s growth from delusion to examination to awareness of what is truly important in life.

To say the book is strange is an understatement.  I think some of the fun of writing is the capturing of different facets of the author in the projects.  Wave Momentum, The Twin, and Aliens all come from different corners of my head.  

Tomorrow, I'll discuss a couple projects I began writing, which have not died but are sitting idle for now while they incubate.  Someday, I'll reopen them.  

The Twin

The next of my novels I'd like to discuss is titled The Twin.  I was "inspired" to research and write this one after watching a BBC documentary on Jesus of Nazareth and his possible connection to India.  As the research went on, it was somewhat amazing how the pieces fell into place.  From a craft perspective, this novel was a bit more complex.

The Twin is the fictional retelling of the story of Jesus of Nazareth from the point of view of Thomas Didymos, known to most as Doubting Thomas. The narrative draws upon the belief of some that Jesus traveled to Kashmir during his missing years, studied Buddhism, and then returned to Galilee to begin his ministry.  After surviving the crucifixion, he returned to Kashmir to live out his life, dying of old age.  The locals in the region actually do believe that Jesus is buried there, in Srinagar, remembered as St. Issa or Yuz Asaf.

The novel is crafted as the translation of an ancient document written in the first person. The first layer is Thomas's own account, and the narrator is potentially unreliable, perhaps even schizophrenic.  The second layer is the translator, a fictional professor of Classics from the University of Cincinnati, who is obviously inept and an egotist, and who includes translator's notes and footnotes throughout.  While Thomas’s narrative is spare just as the New Testament gospels are, and is hopefully thought provoking, it also acts as a “straight-man” for the notes of the professor, which are designed as satire.

For example, the translator is so insecure and arrogant that he repeatedly adds bits to Thomas's account such as, "I was afraid" with a footnote indicating, "While the original document did not actually include this, Thomas must have been afraid at this point." The translator reports that he makes these additions to help the narrative because ancient authors, even writing in 1st person, rarely included how they felt. They only reported the facts, as they knew them. This leads us to wonder, however, how much of the story the professor is changing as he goes, whether due to incompetence or arrogance or both.

The story is provocative and entertaining, humanizing all involved with insecurities, joy, romantic jealousy, and eventually peace, but the narrators are potentially unreliable enough that the work is clearly not a structured attack on Christianity. 

As you can imagine, the reactions to this manuscript vary wildly.  When I talk about the project, there are people who shut down at the mention of the name, "Jesus" because without listening they assume it's a religious book.  The faces of some others darken when they learn the book suggests a story not taught in Sunday school.  However, many of those who have actually read the book have told me they enjoyed it.  My goals were only to be entertaining and thought-provoking.  

I'll only say this about faith in general.  It requires no faith at all to believe in what is obviously true.  It does not require faith to believe the sun will rise in the morning.  Where faith actually exists is when there is the possibility that ANOTHER truth exists BUT, with no additional proof, a person CHOOSES to believe in something despite the other options.  Faith is a choice.  

What is an MFA in Creative Writing?

I've earned one and I don't have the first clue what it means to anyone else.  I know why I studied and read and wrote and workshopped and listened and learned and presented but I couldn't tell you why anyone else did those things.

I wanted to learn how to write better.  Since my first three thriller novels were published by Berkley Books, I had been carrying around that same open secret that many published authors do.  I kept waiting for someone to simply walk up to me in a naked-emperor moment and say, "Man, those books sucked.  I've written 10 novels that no one will publish, or even look at, and every one of my books are better than any of your books.  How did you get someone to publish those?"

I'd be trapped and wounded and I'd be standing there facing my critic and facing the fact that the first words that would pop into my head would be, "Yeah, that's probably true.  I have no idea how I got that lucky."

So, I became a Stonecoaster.  I attended the University of Southern Maine's Stonecoast MFA program. There, with the help of a handful of great professors and a herd of grad students, many of whom are brilliant, I learned to write better.  What I write now is better than what I wrote pre-MFA.  I learned.  I still have much more to learn, but I made progress.

If you want to enter an MFA in Creative Writing program to find a community of writers who will completely understand where you are coming from with your writing obsession, you'll likely find some of that.  It will be as welcoming as you are willing to face where you are up to in your writing.  Some writers are stronger and some weaker.  I don't know who sets the standards, or what the metric is, but good writing is like porn...you know it when you see it.  You'll probably even see some bad writing that will have you scratching your head.  Let that go too, because if you're there for the community, be open to everyone.  Some people will have no real understanding of the publishing industry, though they will insist they do or that they don't need to understand.  Still, every member has something to contribute, and the vast majority will be more knowledgeable than you are, better read than you are, more published than you are.  The best way into that community is with an open mind and open ears.

If you are after an MFA because you want to be a full-time, tenure-track professor at a small liberal arts college in pastoral New England or a prof at a major metropolitan university, I wish I could say that there are jobs for everyone.  In fact, I wish I could say there was one position like that for every 100 MFA's out there.  There are not.  You can adjunct or be an instructor and put in your time and maybe you'll find a position will open for you.  There are two things that will help you if teaching full-time at the tertiary level is why you earned an MFA.  Be willing to move anywhere in the country, especially places where most people don't want to live, and publish a bestseller.

I don't want to be a writer.  I want to be writing, and not necessarily but preferably for an audience of appreciative readers.  The MFA was a way to try and buttress my ego a bit, a way to build my skill and confidence a bit so that the rejections had more fortress to wear away before getting to the chewy center.   It's worked, at least somewhat.  I even look back at those thrillers written for Berkley with pride.  They aren't half bad.  Like any carpenter, I can see every tiny gaff, every missed swing of the hammer, but they accomplished their mission of providing entertainment and I feel I "smarted" them up a bit.  Since those books, and with what I learned to earn my MFA, I feel as though my writing, my craft, has improved.

There has been no post-MFA writing lull.  After I earned a B.S. in English, I admit I stopped reading for a while. With reading loads like a single World Lit course which required the purchase of 13 books (one of which was the Muqaddimah, a book written in 1377 by Ibn Khaldun on the philosophy of writing history) the bachelors degree put me off reading for a while.  I didn't read for pleasure for perhaps two years after earning that degree.  However, after earning my MFA, the only constraint on my writing has been time.  I have two novels in the works and there are 14 short stories making the rounds at various markets, in addition to a completed novel wandering about in six different NYC offices looking for a home.

I'm happy that I now get to feel good about that (most of the time) and the fact I've made what I hope are lifelong friendships with talented, generous, creative, and supportive people.

So I know what an MFA in Creative Writing is to me, and I'm more than satisfied.  I wish that same satisfaction for every MFA candidate and degree-holder.