Tag Archives: inspirations

How Not To Get A Book Deal But Write The Book You Want (FREE version!)

by Andrew | 8 Comments

I still can’t get over the fact of a literary agency charging £649 for a daylong course called How To Get A Book Deal. We all have to earn a crust, but I thought literary agents did that by taking a commission for selling author’s books.

There are some very good courses run by agents and publishers (and writers and editors and writing teachers too …). And there are also plenty of festivals and writing conferences where writers can pay to hear the advice of industry professionals and sometimes even pitch to them – hey, we live under the system of global capital, right? And until the Revolution comes the exchange of money is often the foundation for the use of other people’s time and expertise, okay?!

But £649 is a lot of money to shell out for a day. I trust the pastries will be first-class!

So, for FREE, I’ll let you into a secret.

The way you get a book deal is to write a book someone else wants to read.

It’s as simple as that. And if lots of people want to read it, you could be very successful commercially.

I am not being facetious! I really do think there is great value in grasping the clarity of these facts. Too much can be overegged and overpromised in the world of creative writing, and promises made are rash ones. No one can really predict what a publisher will acquire, or whether a book will sell once it is published.

Stop grasping – just write a good book. If you want to be published, it really comes down to the simple matter of writing something that readers want to read. And it doesn’t even have to be a good book: look in a bookshop!

But, too, what is a good book? Taste matters as much as technique, and we know there’s no accounting for it.

However: it does help to develop your craft and technique, and also to gain inspiration in establishing an effective creative process. And though there are many excellent resources out there that you can pay for, there are also many that are FREE. Here are some of the ones I recommend most frequently.

On intention
Carmen Maria Machado, On Writing and the Business of Writing: a powerful essay on the intersections of art and commerce, grounded in real-life examples. If you are serious about getting published, this is required reading.Alexander Chee, How To Unlearn Everything: written to address that contentious topic of writing ‘the other’, this essay in fact goes to the heart of three of the most important things in writing and publishing: your purpose in writing; your chosen narrative style; and understanding your readers. All writers should read it.

On creative practice
Charlotte Wood and Alison Manning on the Writer’s Life: a series of podcast interviews, with plenty of practical guidance on matters ranging from finding focus and discipline to working with feedback. There are so many podcasts on writing and books, but I’d certainly make room for this one.

On understanding how craft powers your story
Lincoln Michel, On The Many Different Engines That Power A Short Story: or novel or memoir or any narrative form. And while you are there, I highly recommend you sign up for the LitHub Daily – plenty of excellent craft essays and reviews and matters book-related.

On the intersections of plot and character, and how they connect with readers
Parul Seghal, The Case Against The Trauma Plot: lots of food for thought here for how stories are presented as tidy fictions – or messy ones. Valuable reading.

On developing a narrative style
Tell Me A Story and A Book Is Not A Film: blog posts of my own about narration, showing and telling, and knowing who or what is telling your story.
Emma Darwin, Psychic Distance: What It Is And How To Use It: I tend to use the term narrative distance, which I feel is more accurate for relating both interior and exterior modes of storytelling; whatever the language, understanding this concept can really empower your storytelling. And there is a whole textbook’s worth of writing advice in Emma’s excellent Tool-Kit.

On story types
Ronald Tobias, 20 Master Plots: a checklist for the 20 types of story is made available for free by the publisher – really handy for marshalling your narrative content and shaping it into a story. The book it’s based on is a good investment for writers too.

On story structure
Michael Hauge, The 5 Key Turning Points Of All Successful Screenplays: okay, a book is not a film (see above), but it helps to develop an understanding of ways to pace and plot your action. I often suggest that writers watch a favourite movie and look for those key developments in the story such as the Point of No Return and the Major Setback.

On prose style and voice
Chuck Palahniuk, Thought Verbs: a niche matter, but choosing the best verbs to power your sentences is imperative. Lots of other useful craft essays on the LitReactor site too.
Constance Hale, Sorting Out Grammar, Syntax, Usage & Style: there are lots of other resources on Constance Hale’s site too, and her book Sin and Syntax is *the* book on style, grammar and usage I always recommend: practical, witty, and breezy.

On publishing
Margaret Atwood, The Rocky Road To Paper Heaven: a pithy overview of the path from writing a book to getting it out in the world.
Jane Friedman’s Writing Advice Archive: should answer most questions about the business of publishing. Jane Friedman is a good one to follow.

On being realistic
Michael Neff, Why Do Passionate Writers Fail To Publish?: fierce but necessary! I disagree with a few points, e.g., that you must publish short fiction before submitting a novel, but a lot of sound advice here.
Editor’s Rejection Bullets: insights from the world of publishing.

On making yourself comfortable with uncertainty
Masterclass, John Keats’ Theory of Negative Capability in Writing: or cultivating the habit of being ‘in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’. Masterclass has a lot of free articles on other topics too.

On returning to the page
National Writing Project, Thirty Days Of Lockdown Writing: because we don’t want you spending *too* much time doing the reading, a month of daily prompts, many inspired by that guru of writing practice, Natalie Goldberg.

All of that advice: for FREE!

If I were doing this next week, I might have different suggestions. And ideas for podcasts and YouTubes could form entire other posts. Lots out there! Feel free to suggest in comments below.

And if you are really keen, and don’t mind shelling out on a few textbooks or going to the library: here is my DIY MA in Creative Writing. FREE. But you might want to find classmates or writing partners for that.

And there are lots other resources and writing experiments on this site, of course. FREE!

*

I’m right now not blogging as frequently; call this a special edition for the spring equinox, and maybe I’ll try to do something quarterly. But you can also find me on Twitter, and especially on Instagram.

NB: Revised 28 July to include Carmen Maria Machado’s essential essay.

Writing Experiment No. 66: Copyist

by Andrew | 8 Comments

On Saturday I again taught my workshop Everyday Magic: The Four Elements of Writing. We started the day by introducing ourselves with a favourite book, telling the group how and why it’s left an impression on us. Much-loved books came up: The Underground Railroad, Cloudstreet, Ladder of Years, Station Eleven, My Name Is Lucy Barton, Home (twice!), Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, Palace Walk, Pride and Prejudice, A Song For Issy Bradley, This Is How You Lose Her, East of Eden, Tirra Lirra by the River, Finn Family Moomintroll.

What was evident was that all of these books had in some way evoked feeling for their readers: these books are loved. One writer talked about the book she chose simply leaving her in awe, and it’s often hard to sum up how and why the simple fact of words on a page have spun their magic.

As writers we have to read books critically as well as for pleasure, unpicking the workings of craft and identifying techniques that have, however invisibly, had an impact on the reader.

Such analysis usually requires the sort of critical thinking we might have done in a literature class, e.g., looking at the effects of word choice and sentence length on tone, or identifying actions that define a character, or finding symbols layered within the work. Francine Prose’s book Reading Like A Writer is a super guide in exactly that.

Much of my Everyday Magic workshops is, however, about not thinking about writing, i.e., not so much engaging our thinking gear (Air in the four elements), but also working with the energy (Fire), emotions (Water), or physicality (Earth) of writing in order to develop and expand our instincts and experiences as writers.

There are many ways to do this. A couple of methods that I often recommend (and that we did on Saturday) are reading a text aloud, and listening to it, e.g., listening to an audiobook, or to a writing partner reading some of your own work back to you. I’m also thinking of friends in Boulder who have a reading group where, rather than reading a book for discussion, the members gather simply to read books aloud in a group, taking it in turns to read sections or chapters. They’ve read large amounts of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf that way – and in both instances I can’t help but feel that reading aloud or listening are perhaps the ideal ways to experience certain writers.

In both instances, my old teacher Bobbie Louise Hawkins would say that the sheer acts of utterance and listening have a chemical effect on the body, and that affects how you write. The physical act of listening can slow us down and make us more thoughtful, more attentive. I certainly feel that being immersed in a good audiobook can shift my mood for the better. Reading and writing are, after all, physical acts too, so it’s worth paying attention to their somatic qualities.

This sets me thinking to another somatic exercise that I sometimes suggest: copying out text.

For this writing experiment:

* Find a memorable passage in a favourite book, and copy it out by hand on to the left hand page of a notebook – see my example of copying out ‘The Werewolf’ by Angela Carter above. When you reach the bottom of the page, continue it on the next left-hand page, until the scene is done. (Two or three pages should be fine.) As you are writing, pay attention: to word choices, to sentence length, to verbs, to punctuation, to the introduction of content, to beats within the action – but perhaps try not to think about this as you’re doing it. Just: pay attention through the physical act of copying.

* Then perhaps take things further by using the writing you’ve just copied out as a model for some writing of your own: on the right-hand pages of your notebook, write a passage that physically emulates the writing you have just copied out, roughly line by line. Write paragraphs and sentences of a similar length, e.g., using verbs in the same places as the original, adding description or dialogue where the original had description or dialogue, introducing new characters or aspects of content at similar points.

* You could also try copying this out using keyboard and screen – a different physical experience.

This is, of course, just an experiment, and I don’t necessary recommend writing a whole book this way … Not least, there might be the matter of plagiarism, though probably not if the content is different – there are ethics in acknowledging influences and models, but there are many shades of grey here too; lots of poetry uses found materials from other writing, after all.

Copying out writing is a known practice. Hunter S. Thompson apparently used to copy out The Great Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms so that he could understand what it felt like to write a masterpiece; his biographer describes it as an ‘unusual method for learning prose rhythm’. This exercise in the somatics of writing might be a good way of shifting gear in your writing process, letting you experience in a fresh way a book that has inspired you. Think of it as echoing as a writing practice, and an exercise in listening to your body.

Friday Writing Experiment No. 34: Windy Ditties

by Andrew | Leave a comment

The clocks are turning back tonight, and the path’s twirling with red and yellow leaves because it’s getting very blustery out there. High winds are predicted over the next few days, which made me think about winds in literature. Shelley’s ‘Ode To The West Wind’. ‘Windy Nights’ by Robert Louis Stevenson. The cyclone that gathers up Dorothy and Toto in The Wizard Of Oz. Mary Poppins blows in on a wind (you want to skip to 2:01 there, rosy cheeks and everything), and of course all those answers are blowin’ there too in the Bob Dylan song. Gone With The Wind, The Shadow Of The Wind, Written On The Wind, The Wind In The Willows. In Tibetan Buddhist philosophy the windhorse holds a central place representing basic goodness, and most mythologies have gods or goddesses of the wind.

I was reaching for the memory of how Cathy’s ghost visits Lockwood at the start of Wuthering Heights, and turned to my tatty Penguin Classic: ‘I heard distinctly the gusty wind, and the driving of the snow.’ Then duh! Of course, ‘wuther‘ is a word that describes the wind (‘dialect English to blow with a dull roaring sound’).

And is there any song more lovely and more haunting than Kate Bush’s ‘Wuthering Heights’? But is it out on the ‘wiley’, ‘wild and’, or ‘winding’ ‘windy moors?! I’m not sure I ever figured that out. We used to singalong with ‘winding’ as kids. Ah!

For this week’s writing experiment: Compose something that uses the wind. A character that blows in on a wind, either literally or metaphorically. An ode to the wind, or a haiku (I’m thinking haiku are often very still, but do they have to be?!). A tale about a windy deity, or a story that uses the wind in some other way, or maybe just a piece that uses wind in the title. Maybe look up wind-related words in an etymology. Blow out the cobwebs with some revision of an old piece by writing a wind into it. Consider how you too can conjure up all the romance and associative power and elemental energy of this force of nature.

As ever, be concrete and specific in your choices in writing.